Sue Challis

Paola’s Dance

Sue Challis — Thu, 20 Oct 2011 13:00:16 +0000

A short piece made with Paola Alessandro at my ‘In Disguise’ residency at The Hive Arts Centre, Shrewsbury – part of an exploration of identity – 2005

Impact Arts !

Sue Challis — Sun, 20 Mar 2011 20:00:52 +0000

Following two years of documentary video-making with the Changes Consultancy’s Home Office project ‘Active Citizenship’ I was asked to help a group of ten South Asian and Black Country women write a successful £23,000 Arts Council bid for a 12 month arts project. As coordinating artist I was privileged to be part of the whirlwind of creativity which followed as the women developed individual artworks using photography, video installation, textile printing and sculpture, to ‘tell their journey’ in a stunning exhibition at Wolverhmpton Art Gallery’s Bantock House Gallery, professionally curated by established Irish artist Mona Casey.

This was probably the most satisfying project I’ve ever been involved with: maybe because I had known the group and they had known each other for two years previously; we were well funded and met fortnightly for a whole year, with several weekend residentials and a trip to London galleries; we could afford excellent professional artists (including Shaheen Ahmed, Adrienne Frances, Mona Casey) and had a quality venue to exhibit in – with marketing support from WMAG.

Extract from video and installation By Pauline Callaghan

Reading Agatha Christie (2007)

Sue Challis — Sun, 20 Mar 2011 19:55:14 +0000

Reading Agatha Christie (2007) was made with a group of Iraqi Kurdish refugees in Birmingham. It shows a number of ‘Middle Eastern’ people trying to read from Christie’s ‘They Came to Baghdad’ in Arabic in a film clearly made for ‘the record’ rather than aesthetic reasons. While the artist and Iraqi cameraman constantly interrupt, giving conflicting instructions, the readers’ expressions subvert the implicit control. This tense and funny film explores the interactions between cultures and emerged from the disquiet I felt about sources of knowledges about the Middle East – I read a lot of of Agatha Christie, who, despite her casual colonial racism, is widely read in the region (and apparently much requested at the internment camp Guantanamo Bay). The film has shown in Birmingham and London, and at the Cairo Film and Video Festival, and the Festival of Time Based Media in Vermont, USA. This is a short extract from a longer film.

Reading Agatha Christie 2007 Extract

Ahmet’s Bricks (2010) – exploring place, displacement and nostalgia for home

Sue Challis — Mon, 22 Nov 2010 17:06:20 +0000

The Aman Arts Project 2010

Sue Challis — Mon, 22 Nov 2010 15:43:39 +0000

Working closely with Shahida Choudhry (Women’s Networking Hub) and the Muslim Women’s Network, I coordinated and delivered two projects at the Midlands Arts Centre (MAC), Birmingham. The project aims to give a voice to unheard voices: ‘hard-to-reach’ women previously inexperienced in creative projects were given financial support for transport and childcare, skills tuition and encouragement to develop their ideas. It’s hoped their work will go on display at the MAC in 2011. One is an ongoing year-long videomaking project with 15 Muslim women of various ages, who were offered videocameras and support to make films on any topic. The other was a four-day workshop, delivered with Adrienne Francis and Dilwara Begum, to make ‘story boxes’ using a rich range of materials, about their lives and ideas. Feedback was enthusiastic and highly positive. The video project continues as an unfinanced group activity since MWN’s funding was cut…with films made on the mean streets of Brum, in the heat of Morocco, with refugees, with family members…

(Images by Adrienne Francis)

The mobile Camera Obscura 2010

Sue Challis — Tue, 09 Nov 2010 18:09:38 +0000

Working as LUCIDA with local painter Antonio Farelli : we constructed a 3mx3mx4m mobile Camera Obscura – the ‘dark room’ used by portrait painters of the past to facilitate rapid, acurate drawing. Hundreds of adults and young people experienced the magic of ‘the world turned upside down’ and enjoyed unexpected success with sketching portraits of their friends. The Camera Obscura workshops ran at Shropshire’s Teenage Kicks event and twice in the town main square, working well in sunny and grey days: feedback was outstanding. Book now for events from May – Sept 2011. Project supported by ‘Shrewsbury Summer Season’. Photographs by Graham Peet (The Public). For Camera Obscura used by Old Masters, see Hockney-Falco Thesis, Wikipedia